One in Seven Billion

I’m a big fan of the visual display of quantitative information, but which I mean using pretty pictures to illustrative complex concepts and facts.

On the left is a classic example of the art. Produced in 1885, it depicts Napoleon’s advance on Moscow and subsequent retreat, the battles and distances involved, his rapidly diminishing army and the falling temperatures throughout the campaign.

According to this, I was the 76,011,685,432nd person to be born since history began and the 2,689,957,420th to be alive at that moment. But then I’ve always suspected that I wasn’t unique.

What really hammered home the population message though was the graph that came with the unimaginably large numbers. That’s it below, illustrating that the number of people living on this planet has more than doubled in my lifetime. And it is climbing.

It really makes us seem like a virus infecting the Earth.

Nobody’s prefect. If you find any spelling mistakes or other errors in this post, please let me know by highlighting the text and pressing Ctrl+Enter.

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Nice, visualisastion through models and diagrams really has been going on since the dawn of time, it makes me smile about the high strung academics who think that these such models are unique to explaining theory and somehow try to take ownership of them!

Ever heard of the concept of “intellectual property”? Pinching my idea to line your blog is the height of bad manners you bounder and my solicitor will be in touch with you shortly! Solicitors, by the way, have increased in number faster than the expanding population Qatar! So graph that!